


Neutral

by GretchenSinister



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012), The Sandman (Comics)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-05
Updated: 2019-09-05
Packaged: 2020-10-10 06:16:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20523317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Original Prompt: "Not really asking for a specific kink here, but I simply couldn’t stop thinking of Morpheus whenever Pitch showed up. If anyone can pull off Pitch, Sandy and Dream being connected/related/aspects of each other somehow, I would love forever. |D"This is the fourth thing I’ve written for RotG where Gaiman comes into play. Not really a relevant fact, but there you go. Neil is my weakness.Morpheus tries to find a new way of interacting with new humanity.





	Neutral

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 5/8/2013.

He is necessary. Inherent to the structure of the universe. Unchanging (or so he thinks). Endless. 

He is truly neutral, the dispassionate center of the dreams and nightmares of all sentient creatures. This is why he should not be doing what he is about to do, and it is why he does not care to question why he is about to do it anyway. 

Morpheus is beyond the beings whose minds periodically traverse his realms, and he knows this. They are not _safe_, strictly speaking, when he is around. 

Perhaps this has always troubled him, and perhaps he has always been able to ignore that ever-so-slight unsettled feeling. Now, meeting more and more members of this new species—humans—he finds that he wishes, now and then, that he could be safe for them. 

They love their dreams so. He almost thinks that if he had not existed (an impossibility, but he is familiar with such things) they would have been able to create him. But they are still so fragile, especially the children, who accept him without question. They need someone who is on their side, not neutral. 

And so, for unclear (yet surely not sentimental) reasons, Morpheus shapes his dreamsand into someone who will take their part. The figure is short and rotund, clad in simple robes. He is crowned with wild golden hair, and when he opens his eyes they shine like the sun. His smile at the Shaper is warm and glad as the first day of summer. 

He puts more of himself into this new being than he realizes. He gives him power over dreamsand, free access to his realms, and all the strength he needs to carry out Morpheus’ one order: Protect them and give them good dreams. The little man presses his palms together and bows his head before flying across the sky like a shooting star—and then not like a shooting star. His wake of golden dreamsand begins to form curlicues that shine in their shapes with the sheer joy of being. 

Morpheus thinks he smiles then, but he does not. For now, too many of his smiles have been placed within humanity’s Sandman. 

However, he is not done with shaping for this night. He is neutral, and as humanity has been given a being of pure dream, so must they also be given a being of pure nightmare. It is a law of metaphysical motion, if such terms may be prematurely applied tens of thousands of years before the birth of a man named Newton.

The nightmare creature he makes to look much more like himself. It seems proper to him, somehow. Tall and slender as a shadow when the sun is close to setting, the new thing wears a black cloak of shadows and has a face much like that of a bird of prey. 

More like himself, Morpheus is less pleased with the nightmare. He gives him nothing but a name: “You are Pitch Black, the Nightmare King.”

“What shall I do?” Pitch Black asks into his creator’s silence.

“You will learn,” Morpheus replies.

Pitch leaves the scene of his inauspicious birth in the shifting moonshadows of a tree blown about like a mad thing in the night wind. 

Only later does Morpheus realize that he gave the nightmare a voice and, to the dream, only silence. Later still, he begins to ponder what this might mean.


End file.
